Like a Guilty Chimney

I was meandering around my apartment a few days ago, terribly close to feeling, for one split second, bored.  It was terrifying;  there is, for me, almost no worse sensation, and I’ve been successful for years in avoiding it.  To head it off, I walked over to one of my more neglected bookshelves and started nosing through books from my distant past.

I was almost immediately confronted with an unexpected sight: my own handwriting, on the inside cover of a book.  And then the memory came flooding back:  during a sizeable period of my 20s, I did a lot of writing inside of books.

First, I like to write things, as readers of my blog know.  And I’m not referring to the creative writing aspect of my interests, I mean I just like to write.  Even now, I fill notebooks with meaningless lists and jibber-jabber.  I’ve always been a writer-downer.  But during my mid-twenties—after I began drinking very seriously as an alcoholic but before my life became a miserable unlivable mess—I went through a period of two or three years when a majority of my nights were spent at friends’ houses, or friends of friends’ houses, or the house of a friend’s out-of-town grandparents, or a house a co-worker was house-sitting.  It wasn’t an unhappy time, just a time of listless drifting, half-hearted partying, and a fair amount of depravity.

For the majority of this time period, my faithful companion was a backpack, in which I kept my alcohol (White Tavern Gin, half gallon, almost always), clothes and/or toiletries if I had any, cigarettes, and whatever book I was currently reading.  This was quite often all I had with me in foreign homes.  And I often found myself the only person awake in these places.  Granted, as an alcoholic, there was a lot of sleeping in my life, but you’d also be surprised how drunk a practiced alcoholic can get after a few years of really going at it.  And so it was on many, many occasions, I found myself in homes where I felt slightly uncomfortable, often the only person awake very late at night, in complete silence for whatever reason (don’t wake the parents/wife, can’t figure out how to turn the TV on, cable bill didn’t get paid, or just plain no TV or stero to be found, etc), and after some time, I’d become largely too drunk to actually read the book I had with me.  This is when I started writing inside my books—because they were the only thing I could find to write on, and I had little else to do.

Not everything I found on my bookshelf was a great example of these writings.  Sometimes it was just me leaving these little markings for my future self, a little flag saying, “Hey!  You liked this part!”  I think it’s cute and optimistic.  Here is a “flag” from my copy of Joseph Heller’s “Catch 22”:

(clicking on any of the photos, and then click it again when it re-loads, to see the full-size scan)

And here’s another one not quite from lonely drunken nights, but from a golden era in a relationship I had with a marvelous woman named Cory.  We both took turns reading stories in the “Collected Short Stories” of Ray Bradbury.  We devised a coding system in the table of contents.  (there are 6 pages like this):

Now, for some of the “lonely night” book scribbling.  Here is a poem I wrote inside my “Selected Poems” of E.E. Cummings (a book I must have owned for almost 20 years now, and I still consult nearly every month, but I didn’t know this poem was in the back of it until I checked for this blog entry).  The text of the poem is this:

Richard Simmons is a terrible man.
He seems to be more happy than
a lazy sleeping noiseless cat
which doesn’t mind being fat.

Some incomprehensible blabber from the back cover of Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”.  It looks like academic notation, although I never had to read it for school:

From C.S. Lewis’ “The Problem of Pain”.  Also, there’s a phone number (I came across a lot of phone number’s written in books; this was before the cell phone).  Anyone recognize the number?

For a time, I stayed in the basement of some friends of mine.  This basement had zero entertainment modules in it…no television, radio, whatnot…in fact, it barely had light in it.  But it did contain, most of the time, thousands of dollars in musical equipment:  full drum kit, multiple guitars, 4-track recorders and all sorts of other gadgets and whirlygigs I never understood.  That’s because this basement was the de facto practice space of a band called Post Vintage (one of my friends who lived at this place was the bassist), and let me tell you, I loved this band.  Not just because my friend was in it or because I lived in their practice room, but because they ruled!  (listen to their stuff here; they’re unfortunately no longer active.)

Anyway, this is all a very long way of telling you that, apparently, one night in this dark, quiet basement, I decided to write the lyrics to their song “Next at Seven” inside the front cover of my copy of Sylvia Plath’s “Collected Poems”.  “Next at Seven”‘s lyrics are by Dave Peifer, whose solo work (as Isotope) can be heard here.

Anyway, this one kind of shocked me.  I have no memory of doing this.  Although I do distinctly recall having my Plath phase at the same time I lived in the basement here.  Not, largely, a very happy time in my life.

But here, for me, is the one that really tickled me.  A drunken poem (I can always tell when something I wrote was composed while intoxicated) inside the cover of Gregory Corso’s “Mindfield”.  Corso is (I think he’s still alive) a Beat poet who I liked very much back then but not so much now.  His poetry is also markedly different than the poem I wrote inside his book, which I think it interesting.  But what’s most interesting to me is that I really like this drunken poem I wrote.  That is very rare.  I wrote like shit when I was drunk.  But this one really seems to capture the whole feeling and environment I’ve descibed to you from this time period of my life:  being the only person, awake and drunk in a house that I am unfamiliar with, and the subtext of sorrow and addiction I was feeling.  This is the poem:

Upon finding myself too drunk to read
and too severed to cavort
with folks
I resign to my own posturing
amongst myselves
amidst sleeping zombie-me’s.

Twirling in this foreign apartment
thier slumbering noses
reflect the television screen
and I cannot find my shoes.

Like a guilty chimney I sit still.

Maghound, Tree of Life, and holy boxes!

1.  Yesterday I learned that one of my nearest and dearest services, Maghound, will be going out of business.  Now, Maghound isn’t famous, and I’ve never mentioned it on this bloggy wog despite being a product evangelist for four years and an early adopter of the service (I signed up in it’s first month of beta testing).  What it is (was) is a service that allows you to recieve a bunch of magazines without subscribing to them, and to change which magazines you get a monthly basis.  I was usually on the 7-a-month plan, so I would choose 7 magazines from their vast selection.  If one month I got, say, Golf Magazine (I never did) and didn’t like it, I could change that slot the next month to get Mother Earth News (great mag).  Maghound wasn’t the method I used to get my favorite magazines—those I always actually subscribe to, the old-fashioned way, but Maghound has been a wonderful way for me to explore new realms of reading, and along the way, I’ve found a lot of publications that I’ve really loved, and been able to get one or two issues of magazines that interest me but not enough to recieve for a whole year.  It really has been a great service (and they have some of the best customer service representatives I’ve ever had to talk to) and I am extremely sad that it is going out of business.  It’s been a part of my life like Netflix is for myself and many others, and it sucks that there’s probably not even a single other person I know who will mourn it with me.  So I say here, on this tiny little bloggy wog:  I’ll miss you, Maghound!

2.  The order I would vote for the films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar (I’ve seen them all):

1.  The Tree of Life
2.  Hugo
3.  The Artist
4.  Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
5.  The Descendants
6.  Midnight in Paris
7.  The Help
8.  Moneyball
9.  War Horse

3.  I’m not a pack rat, but it’s dawned on me recently that I may have a few too many things that I am just “kinda into” that I am constantly accruing for no serious purpose.  For instance, I can’t stop aquiring bags; I love getting messenger bags, sling backpacks,  cargo bags, and, most shamefully, totes.  I essentially have a closet full of these (thankfully inexpensive) things I almost have no use for.  In the summer, when I bike a lot, I have one small backpack that I use exclusively for biking, and one messenger bag (the first one I ever got) that I use when I do things like go to a Starbucks and write and read like a pompus asshole.  These bags are not falling apart anytime soon, so why I keep getting new ones is mystifying.

Likewise, I have about 200 more notebook-type things than I will use in a lifetime.  I simply cannot stop buying composition books (in 3-packs), small yellow legal pads, cheap black patent leather journals (for the love of God, don’t ever buy me a Moleskine journal, I hate them!), planners, and, oddly, these.  Now, I actually do quite a bit of writing, and not just the fancy-schmancy crapola that turns up on ye olde Notes From the Fire, but I’m always making little insignificant lists and writing little cheeseball sayings and quotes from movies and letters to friends, etc etc; I typically have one or two notebooks of various types going for each room of my apartment, and some that travel from room to room for various reasons.  I seriously require 7 or 8 different notebook-type things at any given time.  But I probably have close to a hundred (again…thankfully cheap) things of this nature right now.  I just love buying them. 

Guess what else this weirdo loves?  Boxes.  Not cardboard boxes, but boxes like this and this and this.  Oh, I’ve got them.  Oh, and photo boxes?  Michaels has them on sale for 2 bucks right now and it’s all I can do to keep myself from buying 50.

I guess what I’m saying is…what the hell is wrong with me?

The Problem

The problem as I see it
with writing poetry,
we think we have no foe,
we are walking alone,
but in fact we are fighting the poems,
boxing like prizefighters,
but most of us never have any notion
of when they have knocked us out,
stand overtop us—sweaty, victorious poems—
and we just go on writing more of them,
us damned defeated idiots.

The Final Note

Summer has finally, at long, long last come to Erie, and a happier man, I could not be.  As everyone knows, heat is my wheelhouse.  I feel alive, caffeinated, abuzz with ideas, inspiration, energy and hormones.  The world is absolutely mine.

Summer has always been my most creative season.  I realize I’m not an “artist” of any stripe, per se.  An amateur creative writer would best describe me, I suppose, although I like to think I simply live a creative life, from doodling while I watch TV to giving people nicknames.  I’ve come to a point in my life where I’m perfectly content with the fact that I will never be famous for any of the creative arts (I’m simply not good enough at anything), but I like to keep doing things anyway, because a body’s got to do something with all this time, no?

For just about as long as I can remember, I have taken great joy in the act of creation, from words to drawings (bad as they may be) to short films and photography.  I remember in my teens, I spent almost a whole year simply putting words together by twos, on reams and reams of white lined notebook paper (for instance, copper elephant, democratic pants, shoeshine sunrise, garden car, and on and on, thousands of them).  I did this for no other reason than it brought me joy.  I have dozens of other examples like this from my life.

Which brings me to my point.  Despite numerous attempts to deny it to myself, Notes From the Fire is not only no longer bringing me joy, but I believe it to be sapping my creative energies.  I no longer write anything for fun and excitement, but instead to get “views” on my blog.  I no longer write what I most intensely want to write about, but what is “safe” enough for the blog, but “personal” enough to maintain it’s tone.  I also have made myself feel compelled to post with a certain frequency, thereby often resulting in diminished quality and repititious horseshit.  I know that all these problems are simply results of my own mindset regarding The Notes, but I have tried repeatedly to change this mindset, to no avail.  In short, the blog rules me mentally and is crushing me creatively.

I need some time to once again find what it’s like to write for oneself, or for a future audience—and not for immediate consumption.  In addition, I’m feeling my creative juices pulling me in interesting ways, away from simply the written word and into visual arts.  Right now, I really feel like taking some pictures with actual film, having them developed, and collaging them…some sort of themed collage, perhaps.  That sounds fun.  Maybe I’ll do it in my attic and even throw paint at it or something.  But I’m going to do it for myself and nobody’s going to see it, at least not for awhile (and it will probably be no good anyway, but I’ll have a ton of fun doing it).

Don’t worry, I’m not taking The Notes down.  This website will always be here.  Feel free to peruse old entries; I’ll still reply to comments you make on them.  Also, you can always check out my Netflix queue on here.  :)

Something tells me I’ll be back sooner than I imagine, but on a different site and perhaps in a different format.  Or the break will do me wonders and I’ll be back at The Notes sometime.  Who knows?  There are no rules, and now that it’s summer, I’m going to be proving that as much as possible.  For instance, right now it’s 4am, I haven’t slept yet, and as soon as the sun comes up, I’m going to ride my bike all over this town and take lovely pictures all damn day, because I can.

However, you won’t see them on Notes From the Fire.

Don’t worry though, they’ll still be on Facebook.  I haven’t lost my mind!

Thanks to all of you for reading and making Notes From the Fire a lovely, rewarding experience for me!

Monday’s Song: Arcade Fire, “We Used to Wait”

I may have officially decided on Grinderman’s album as my album of the year, but Arcade Fire’s “We Used to Wait” is undoubtedly my song of the year (their album, The Suburbs, was prevented from being #1 simply by having too much filler, but the good parts of the album are so good as to be timelessly classic rock and roll).  “We Used to Wait” is about as great as a rock song can get: it’s about big but real human stuff (how is technology changing basic human emotional experience?), discussed in unique, innovative ways (lyricist Win Butler never feels the need to over-explain, while not being overly daft or dense), on top of layered sound which is not too-produced but is obviously passionate.  Please enjoy this live version of the song (and in a nod to Dellinger family heritgae, notice the images of U.S. mail the band uses on a screen on the stage, mostly toward the end of the song.  And seriously, how rad is that to use this as the main propulsion of the concept of the song, that we don’t have to wait to recieve our discourse in the mail anymore?  Writers of any ilk—let alone wongwriters—would be extremely fortunate to find such a creative and effective linguistic device!)  And there is very little triumph of rock and roll more succinct and powerful than the ending crescendo of this song, with Butler belting out “Wait for it!”

Three more things right quick:

may I plead with you to re-familiarize yourself with this blog post of mine, about Arcade Fire’s truly incredible online experience centered around “We Used to Wait”, and if you decide to do it, I encourage you to go through the experience a few times, using different addresses from your past.

It has also come to my attention that embedded YouTube on my blog is best when viewed using Firefox or Chrome, but is often quite bad through Internet Explorer.

And in case you missed it, click here for my top 15 albums of 2010.

We Used to Wait
by Arcade Fire

I used to write letters,
I used to sign my name.
I used to sleep at night,
before the flashing lights
settled deep in my brain.

But by the time we met–
by the time we met
the times had already changed.
So I never wrote a letter,
I never took my true heart,
I never wrote it down
So when the lights cut out
I was lost standing in the wilderness downtown.

Now our lives are changing fast;
hope that something pure can last. 

It may seem strange 
how we used to wait
for letters to arrive,
but what’s stranger still
is how something so small
can keep you alive.
(We used to wait.)
We used to waste hours
just walking around.
(We used to wait.)
All those wasted lives
in the wilderness downtown.

(We used to wait.)
Sometimes it never came.
(We used to wait.)
Still moving through the pain.

So I’m gonna write a letter
to my true love,
I’m gonna sign my name.
Like a patient on a table,
I wanna walk again,
wanna move through the pain.

We used to wait for it,
now we’re screaming,
sing the chorus again!

I used to wait for it,
hear my voice scream
and sing the chorus again.

Wait for it!

I’ve got a limited number of copies of a new poetry collection, This is What is Invisible. It’s a small collection—not comprehensive like past ones, but it is a ‘selected’ collection.  Let me know who wants one.  First come, first served.  If I don’t see you often, get me your address.

(nuclear family is assumed to be getting one)

Cold Clothes interview, Part One

The following is intended as a fun writing exercise for myself.  If you’ve been reading my blogs from the very beginning, you’ll remember I did something quite like this about 7 years ago on my very first OpenDiary blog.  This is going to be a “fake interview” with a somewhat fictionalized version of myself, which is being conducted by an entirely fictional small arts magazine called Cold Clothes. If you read the old OpenDiary one, rest assured, this is a completely new edition of this.  You’ll see I have tagged the entry as both “memoir” and “fiction”–and that’s why it is so fun for me!  I am playing in a semi-real world (specifically a semi-real Carlisle) and with a version of me that both is and isn’t me, and there will be no cues for what is fiction and what is memoir. And put up with the early conversation about “art”–it’s just to make the reason for the interview believable.

Cold Clothes brings you Part One of it’s planned 12-part interview with Pennsylvania bohemian Seth Dellinger.  As our magazine has only a circulation of about 231, we are “simul-publishing” the interviews on our website–www.coldclothes.com–as well as Dellinger’s blog, Notes from the Fire.  And since we are a very irresponsible and erratic publication, we make no projections as to the frequency of the installments.  Now, Cold Clothes managing editor Rufus Paisleyface’s Part One of the interview:

I first meet Seth Dellinger at an outside table at his favorite Carlisle coffee house, the Courthouse Commons.  It’s an early autumn day, but Dellinger doesn’t seem to know it yet: it’s jacket weather, but he’s still sporting just

Dellinger outside the Courthouse Commons coffee shop in Carlisle, Pennsylvania

a t-shirt and shorts.  A few times throughout our conversation, he appears to regret this wardrobe decision.  He orders a tall caramel latte.

Cold Clothes: So, here we are, on a sunny afternoon at an outdoor coffee shop, and you appear to have quit smoking?

Seth Dellinger: Yep.  And yeah, if this isn’t the perfect time and place for a smoke, what is, eh?  But I had to quit, you know?

CC: Why?  Lots of your peers haven’t seemed to give it up yet.

SD: I think smoking always seemed to effect me physically a little more than most people.  I had a diminished lung capacity almost immediately after picking up the habit.  I’d be laying in bed and I could feel my heart beating in my head.  I mean, here I am, a 31-year-old guy who’s been away from drugs and alcohol for years now, who likes to be physically active and moving around and doing things, and I’m feeling my heartbeat in my head.  I didn’t like that.

CC: Does any part of you feel that as a drug and alcohol free non-smoker, your validity as an artist has been breached?  A lot of creative types hang their hats on the guttural experience of “use”.

SD: (laughs) So true. Certainly one doesn’t need to have ever used any drugs or mind-altering substances of any kind to make quality art, but I do think you need a sizeable well of life experience to be any good as a creator, and the folks who have always shied away from substances tend to be the same people who shirk a lot of life experiences, although this is certainly not always the case.  Let me say that again: this is certainly not always the case.  And yeah, sure, at first I worried I’d be called a “sellout” or, worse, a “straightedge”, but then I just thought, you know, I’m totally clean because I used things so much I had to stop or die, which is more badass than most of these smokers and drinkers can say.  I’m still badass.

CC: Has if affected your creativity?

SD: Not really.  Now, as before, I’ve not completed any major work that was at all worthwhile (laughs).  But I actually find myself writing a lot more, but the quality downgrades at the same rate as the volume of output, so in the end, I have the same amount of usable material.  I did have to postpone getting together with Duane (Miller) to work on an album we’ve been kicking around for a year now.  I found I wasn’t ready for collaborative work without a smoke yet.  I’m very comfortable writing at home in my own apartment in front of my computer, but the thought of kicking ideas around in Duane’s studio without a cigarette kind of terrified me.

CC: I was under the impression you’d been doing collaborative work with Rothman Hogar very recently?

SD: Well, yeah, but that’s all correspondence work.  Rothman (ed. note: Hogar is Dellinger’s frequent “best friend” and occasionally his “nemesis” artistically.  The two have a long, storied friendship which both are hesitant to talk about.) is currently a writer-in-residence at a university in Norway, and we’re collaborating on a screenplay via e-mail, so it’s still basically solo work because I’m alone while I’m doing it.

CC: Has Rothman’s absence changed the nature of the artistic life here in Carlisle?

SD: Only in the sense that a friend’s absence changes the dynamic of that group of friends.  Since Carlisle’s rise to prominence in the East Coast art scene, there’ve been plenty of personnel changes around here, but the core group remains the same and the general aesthetic remains the same.

CC: OK, now that we’re talking about it, take us back and tell us about the “rise of Carlisle”.  How did it happen?

SD: I’m sure you know that’s not the softball question it appears to be.  There are a few differing versions of how it happened.  Personally, my memory of the first national art media coverage was when Mary (Simpson) and I wrote and produced a play at the Cubiculo Theater here in town that built a slow media following: first the local papers, then the regionals, then the niche national publications, until finally it got a blurb mention in The Atlantic.

CC: That play was Conceited Eagle.

SD: Yep.  Eagle still largely pays my rent, too.  After it’s blurb in The Atlantic, a few regional theaters asked if they could put on a production of it.  Every year it circles a little further out.  This year they’re doing it in Fargo, Kennebunkport, and Denver.  It’ll never make me rich.  It doesn’t even pay the utilities.  Coneited Eagle exactly pays the rent, more or less.

CC: Do you harbor any hopes it will ever go “big time”?

SD: What, Broadway?  Yeah, it’ll probably make Broadway some day, and it’ll play for 18 shows and star someone unusual, like DMX.  I probably won’t like it.

CC: So what made Carlisle become a hotbed of artistic work, rather than this just being the unlikely story of an independently produced play?

SD: It’s almost impossible to say how these things happen.  There were just a lot of us in the right place at the right time.  Some folks interviewed Mary and I about the play a few times, and we mentioned a couple of friends we had–visual artists, musicians, writers, etc–and occasionally they went and interviewed those friends of ours, and people started getting into their stuff and interviewing them, and it was one big cycle.

CC: How famous do you think you can all get?  Could this become a cultural phenomenon?

SD: No way.  The Carlisle scene is bound to stay culty, for a couple reasons.  First, none of us are really pop artists.  I’m mainly poetry.  Rothman writes everything but it’s all very avante garde.  Mary’s a painter.  Jarly (Marlston) is a sculptor.  Duane plays space funk.  Tony (Magni) draws wads of meat.  I mean, c’mon.  The kids are never gonna flock here!

CC: Ryan (Straub) plays some fairly accessible singer-songwritery music.

SD: haha, true, but we’ve been trying to talk him out of it.

CC: How important is it for art to be accessible?

SD: That all depends how accessible you want it to be.  If you’re going for something you want everyone to understand and enjoy, and you end up making something daft, dense, or confusing, then I’d say you’ve certainly failed.  But it doesn’t have to be simple to be accessible.  Charlie Kaufman makes movies lots of people love, including myself.  They’re never going to make a hundred million dollars, but there are lots of fans.  I think it’s just about making what you set out to make, making it play on the level you wanted it to.

CC: Can you give me an example of a time you think that translation has failed?

SD: Sure.  I think Jonathan Franzen’s much beloved novel The Corrections is a failure in that vein.  He seems to want to be writing a really complex, codified novel like Pynchon, but he ends up writing it like a Grisham book.  It was an Oprah book back before Oprah started picking surprisingly good books.  It reads really strange because you can literally see Franzen trying to be dense but it comes off as populist.  It’s like beating off with a limp dick.

CC: So, back to the Carlisle movement: how important is the “group” aspect here?  Would any of you be successful without the group?

SD: We’re not the Beats, if that’s what you mean.  For the most part we participate in different mediums, we have different outlooks, are at very different spots in life.  Mostly, what we create does share a certain tone, a base idea of grit, or the grime of life, but we’re also not afraid to uplift.  You’d be hard pressed to find a photograph with more than three of us in it at any given moment.  I’d love to play up the idea of a group, or movement, because people love that story, but really it’s more like a loose group of friends who are all creative types.

CC: How many of you have been able to quit your jobs?

SD: Most.  But we quit our jobs with the trade-off of living uncomfortably.  We’re not rich.  We’re barely living off of what we do.  Remember, you’re interviewing me for Cold Clothes, not Rolling Stone! (chuckles)  A few of them still labor for their money.  Jarly still works (for the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation).  There’s not a big market for original sculpture right now, but I always say, a decade from now, that guy’s gonna be so rich he won’t even remember where Carlisle is!

CC: OK, maybe we’ve got ahead of ourselves.  Let’s go back before Carlisle.  Tell me about growing up in Newville, a small town about 20 miles from here.

SD: Newville is a very idyllic, perfect little shithole of a town.  It was an ideal town for a boy to grow up in.

CC: haha…um, explain?

SD: It had that quintessential “small town” feeling, that sort of close-knit Thornton Wilder thing that makes you feel comfy and safe and free to ride your bike alone all over town at a very young age, but at the same time, it’s a shithole.  It had seen it’s best days.  It had abandoned factories, forgotten corners of the town where the streets quite literally had no name, drainage ditches full of standing water, back alleys with weeds growing through the pavement.  But despite all this, I never found anything sad about it.  My childhood eyes saw all this blight as a great story.  I loved thinking about Newville’s past, what it had been like as a boom town, what those men in tall hats from the black-and-white photographs would think if they could see it now.  It filled me with a deep sense of time very early in life.

CC: How did your family end up in Newville?

SD: Well my grandma and grandpa Cohick–that’s my mom’s side–lived in the area.  My mom grew up on their farm in Oakville, an even smaller town a little further out.  I suppose at some point in time they sold the farm and moved to Newville.  I know Gram worked for the dress factory in town that was shuttered right around the time I was born.  After my parents were married they must have moved to Newville to be closer to them, although I don’t know those details for sure.  Isn’t it strange the questions you never even think of asking your parents?  Dad’s family was from closer to the river (the Susquehanna), the Mechanicsburg, Wormleysburg-type area.  It’s odd to think about, because my parents are divorced now, and Mom left the area, but Dad still lives in Newville, a place he’s not actually from.  It’s weird how life moves you around.

CC: And here you are, living in Carlisle.

SD: Well yes, but there’s not really a difference between living in Carlisle and living in Newville, geographically.  It’s like the difference between living in Chelsea and living in Greenwich Village.  And I suppose there’s barely a difference between where my dad’s parents raised him and where he ended up.  It’s all south-central Pennsylvania.  But I think it’s just neat how life picks you up, moves you around, and sets you down.  Sometimes it’s a lot more dramatic than Mechanicsburg to Newville.

CC: Did you enjoy your childhood?

SD: Listen friend, if you didn’t enjoy your childhood, you weren’t trying.  I fucking loved it!  I mean, sure, there’s plenty of sadness in childhood.  In fact, about half the poems I wrote in 2004 were trying to figure out why childhood seems so sad.  My childhood certainly wasn’t more sad than anyone else’s–in fact, it was probably happier–but I think as children we just haven’t learned how to deal with the truths of the world yet, and we’re very tuned in to the way things feel.  The passage of time feels quite acute to a child.  Boredom feels very acute.  Unfairness, not getting what you want, not feeling loved at every moment–these things take a lot of years to get used to.  And thank goodness we do get used to them, thank goodness childhood doesn’t last forver, because until you get your emotions and reactions under control in the early teens, you’re essentially useless.  But anyway, despite and maybe because of this deep sense of feeling, childhood is an amazing, magical time.  It’s this same “blank slate” idea that makes us so emotionally sensitive which also makes the world an extraordinary place to a child.  “Puddle-wonderful”, as Cummings called it.  Try as I might in my adult life, I’ve never been able to acheive the kind of free-form imaginitive play I had as a kid.  And that’s the thing:  I do try. I mean, I live by myself, I don’t have a job, I’m single and no kids.  Some nights, when I’m home, there’s nothing to watch, I’m sick of the book I’m reading, and I don’t feel like writing.  I look around my apartment and think, I should play.  And why shouldn’t I?  There shouldn’t be anything wrong with a grown-up playing.  So I turn everything off, make my hands into guns, or my golf bag into a dragon, or any number of things, and I give it a go.  But it never works.  My hands become hands again way too quickly, and the golf bag always looks much too much like a golf bag, and I just end up putting on a Radiohead album and pretending I’m a rock star, which is play to an extent, but it’s totally useless grown-up play.  It’s more about commerce and culture and self-glorification than childhood play.  I always remember this essay I wrote in 12th Grade english class about childhood play, and how my teenage life was really missing my childhood play.  That essay is still one of my favorite things I’ve ever written, because in it, I described childhood play in such a luscious, compelling, chunky way.  I could never write about childhood play like that nowadays.  It’s like my 18-year-old self was still tenuously connected to my childhood self.  I still had a visceral notion of what it had been like.  Not so anymore.  Nope, nowadays remembering childhood is like watching a movie through a bedsheet.  I can’t imagine what it’s like when you get older still; it must be like that childhood happened to somebody else entirely.

CC: Were you a social child?

SD: Reluctantly.  Which is another way of saying “no”, I guess.  I was pretty much terrified of people I didn’t know.  In fact, I was more scared of kids I didn’t know than I was of strange adults.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I had friends, but it was a long process for me to feel comfortable with them.   I had much more fun playing by myself, controlling all the plot points and characters.  But most of it comes down to fear.  I was one of the most scared kids around.

CC: You were scared of other children?

SD: Absolutely.  In both the theoretical and the very concrete sense.  Theoretically, I was afraid no one was going to like me, that I wouldn’t be understood, that I’d be ridiculed.  Concretely, I was literally afraid other kids would end up beating the shit out of me.  I’m not sure if this just came from being a short kid or not, if maybe it came from somewhere deeper, but it wasn’t until perhaps the age of 14 that I stopped worrying everyone wanted to hurt me.  It had nothing to do with my home life: my parents were not violent or physical.  I got spanked a handful of times, very civilly, very by-the-book.  Sometimes I think I just got born with a “scared” gene, and it’s been the major story of my life, overcoming it.

CC: Did you get in many fights as a kid?

Dellinger, age approx. 2 years, admiring one of his grandfather's sweet potatoes.

SD: No.  One or two, really, though the one was very, very terrifying.  It was this kid Shawn Wilson.  He was one of the baddest ass kids in Newville.  Like, you did not fuck with Shawn Wilson, even at the age of seven.  And I was in this church yard one day, this church yard that was a few blocks from our house on Big Spring Avenue.  I used to go there to play all the time.  They had some swings, a really big lush lawn, and even a small topiary maze.  Of course now, as an adult, it looks like a shrub-lined walkway, but at six, seven, eight years old, it was a topiary maze.  I was there playing by myself, and Shawn Wilson shows up.  At first, he played with me, but then for some reason he pushed me to the ground, got on top of me, wouldn’t let me up.  Of course, I cried immediately, did a kid version of pleading with him, but my fear just fed his aggression.  So he got a bit sadistic on me.  He let me up, but he wouldn’t let me leave.  I’d try to walk toward my house, and he’d run in front of me, knock me down again.  It turned quite epic.  I remember, what seemed like hours into this ordeal, I managed to escape, finally getting onto the sidewalk, y’know, that sign of civilization, and having this immense feeling of relief wash over me.  I felt like I had barely survived with my life.  That’s a moment from my childhood I remember with precision clarity, that feeling.  It’s poignancy is not diminished because I was so young at the time.  I felt like my life had been spared.  That’s a heavy feeling for a kid.  I ran the two blocks home and breathlessly told my mother the story.  She was a substitute teacher at the time, so was often home during the day.  I breathlessly recounted my ordeal.  She was concerned, of course, and very motherly to me, but must have been unconvinced of the epic severity.  I remember wondering why she wasn’t calling the police and giving me some secret grown-up medicine and calling the local news.  And the few times I’ve recounted this story to people over the years, I’ve gotten the same reaction. You see, you can’t ever actually make someone feel how you felt.  It is important to remember this when making art, too.  You can only get them really, really close, and then only if they’ve felt something similar before as well.  I will always be disappointed by anyone’s reception of this story, because I still get worked up thinking about it, over twenty years later.  I probably shouldn’t tell it anymore.  Oh, and Shawn Wilson?  He’s dead now.  A few years back, car accident.

CC: So now you’re the only one who remembers.

SD: Yep.  I’m the only person with the memory of that childhood fight.  And I like it that way.  Shawn Wilson may have grown up to be a different sort of man than the evil bastard who held me hostage in that church parking lot, but I’m still happy to not share anything with him, not even a memory.

CC: What else were you scared of as a kid?

SD: Just about everything.  I was scared of moving things, very much.  Motorcycles, horses, trains, amusements park rides.  I still won’t ride amusement park rides or horses.  I still haven’t conquered everything!  But yeah, fast things.  Bugs, snakes, the sky, night time.  Death was a big one.  I thought about death a lot.  My grandparents.  Rain.  You name it.  I mean, don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t unable to leave the house, or quivering like an idiot any time I was in public.  I’m sure there are plenty of people who had as fearful childhoods as I did.  I learned how to act through most of it.  Sure, I was still scared shitless when our parents would take my sister and I to, say, the Newville Fair, but I gradually learned how to hide it.  Well, hide it the best I could.  It was still no secret to those around me that I was mostly terrified.  But the acting is a skill I’ve really refined in my adult life.  While the fear is mostly gone from me, I now use it to disguise foul moods, sadness, worry.  I could be afraid I’m dying and hide it from everybody for a long period.

CC: Were you creative as a child?

SD: Sure.  But I never had one of those big moments you hear a lot of people talk about.  You know, I knew the moment I opened “Where the Sidewalk Ends” that I was going to be a writer or My parents rented “E.T.” and I knew in the first ten minutes I was going to be a film director. No, I never saw art that compartmentalized, and I still don’t, or at least, I try not to.  As a kid, I just knew I liked things that used that creative part of the brain, that idea that you can laugh or cry or sweat because of things that aren’t really there, or aren’t actually happening.  I was always drawn to that, and to the depth of emotion you can allow yourself to feel at these things.  I was always amazed by those depths.  Also, I remember losing my breath a little bit the first time I saw those little lights along the aisle floors in a movie theater.  That looked like real-world magic to me.

The Seth Dellinger interview from Cold Clothes will be continued!

Some Sort of Contest Thing Which Must Be Some Kind of Honor

My buddy Joel, who writes a tremendous and wonderfully creative blog over at Write. Click. Cook. Listen, recently nominated me for some sort of blog award which, after I looked into it, seems to not really be an award, but some dude’s way of getting alot of people to look at his blog.  Regardless of it’s legitimacy, I’m honored that Joel chose to nominate me, as Joel is a very smart man and his blog is the bee’s knees.

However, since I have chosen to acknowledge the award, I am obligated to follow it’s somewhat strange rule of nominating five more people (which would seem to defeat the purpose to generating only the best nominations, and instead create a theoretically never-ending loop of diminishing returns).  Luckily, I know some people with incredible blogs, so they, too, should be pseudo-honored, and I am happy to do so.

1.  My sister Adrienne has a great blog, Yada Yada Yada, wherein she explores the humorous, poignant, and irreverent aspects of her home and family life, along with concise observations from everyday existence.

2.  My California-based internet homeslice Kyle dashes off some of the funniest stuff I’ve ever read over at Power Fantastic Blogs.  Ranging in topic from the life of a chronically jilted, love-lorn man, to self-assured political commentary, to opinionated film and media comment, Kyle is right down my alley, and is a better writer than he admits to himself.

3.  Jersey/Philly-based Angela‘s blog, Deus ex Machina, chronicles her experience in art school as well as some of her more obsessive interests, from evolution to memes to feedback loops.  This one’s a thinker, but wholly accessible.

4. Newly transplanted to NEW YORK CITY!, Teri writes about media and culture–and how they interact–at her almost-academic but entirely fun blog questioning…

5. April (still blogging at MySpace, so I’m not sure if everyone can see it) writes intensely personal entries which contain insight into not only her life, but everyone’s lives.  Her honesty and openness provide great jumping-off points for pondering issues about oneself.

All my nominess, if you are interested in participating in this almost-contest, see the rules here.

7/19/09

1.  Before an awesome lunch with Joni, we saw a squirrel trying to get into a drainpipe, and it was hilarious.

2.  Joni also wore what I would consider to be the shirt best matched to the person wearing it, ever.  It’s like someone made that shirt for her.

3.  Started off my day by watching 2005’s ‘Rumor Has It’.  I loved it. What’s going on with me and romantic comedies?  I used to think they were the devil.

4.  Saw the very first guy who was my roommate my first time through rehab walking down the street with a case of beer.

5.  I’m going to mention my sister now so I can create a sister tag for my blog, which I don’t understand how one doesn’t already exist.  PS my sister rules.

6.  Walked from my apartment to Thornwald Park, did some reading, met Michael there, and we watched a nice free bluegrass show in the park.  Talked through most of it.  Beautiful evening for sitting in a park for live music.  Instead of walking right home, I stopped at the theater and saw ‘Bruno’.  It was OK.  It’s no ‘Borat’.  Then stopped at the chinese buffet.  Then went to wal-mart and bought more stuff than I should have, since the walk back was rather long.  My shoulder hurts.

7.  Quote from Michael today:  “You want to eat my arm, don’t you?”

8.  Mary is a freelance writer.  She got a job today to write a screenplay that apparently involves a road trip and medicinal marijuana.  I’m excited for her!

9.  Took some dumpster pictures on my walk today.  I continue to be amazed by how many great dumpster pics I can get in this one podunk town of Carlisle.

10.  Going to bed now, going to try to catch up on the 8 unread magazines on my bedside table.

11.  Oh, PS, another quote from Michael today:  “What’s a romantic attachment?  Is that like a dildo or something?”

12.  Things I need to add to this entry to create tags for my blog without having to actually write an entry about them:

Paul, Modest Mouse, NPR, P.T. Anderson, Philip Larkin, High School, Childhood, spirituality, woods

For Ruby

Following is one of my favorite poems that I have written.  Whenever I list my favorites, it still typically ranks in the top five.  However, it has now garnered an interesting history.  I wrote it for a woman I knew who was dying of cancer; in fact, at the time of its writing, the doctors had given her a month to live.  Miraculously, she did live, pulled through, made a full recovery, and then proceeded to pursue me romantically.  We dated, in a minor way, for a month or two until I perceived she was a chronically bad person, and I cut ties with her.  Shortly after cutting ties, it dawned on me suddenly one day that she had been faking her cancer, along with many other smaller aspects of her life.  Recently, other people in her life have been uncovering her web of lies, and I was, briefly, drawn into the fracas, despite the fact that I don’t care about this woman any more.  Anyway, long story short, this whole affair has made me think alot about this poem again, and ponder how much the true events of life might change the content of the poem–but that’s all a discussion for another day.  I still love the poem, and if she had been dying, I think it’s a pretty swell tribute, and it aint easy to write a good poem for someone who’s dying.  I have changed her name (and hence also the title of the poem) because she doesn’t deserve to be associated with it anymore.  So here it is:

For Ruby

There are men with grease-covered fingers
Who in shack-like bars
Drink strong whiskey
Night after night
And speak of earthy things
Like work and sports
Cars and overtime
Night after night.
They wear the tattered clothes of toil
And smell like mud and forgotten coffee;
These men with the grease-covered fingers
Don’t come and go
(don’t change season to season)
And for better or worse
They know the value of a passing hour.

There are wrinkled women with knitting needles
Who in large bay windows sit
As the town becomes cold
And all around them lights go dim
(pull the needle, pull the string).
They watch the cars drive slowly by
While inside their brains
The foggy undercurrent of old age rages
(the broken bones of youth?
the marriages, the foot doctors,
the miserable trips to the beach with the bee stings,
remember?)
And the smells of fried eggs and moth balls
Leak from under their doors;
These sagging women with the knitting needles
Have forgotten what they used to know about time,
And bodies.

There are the lawyers, the savages, the body-building kids;
There are men in tight pants, women at car washes, babies in blankets;
There are balloonists, enthusiasts, part-time party clowns;
There are the frat boys with the tucked-in Polos,
Women on Death Row delivering infants,
The dry-wall hangers with the nagging cough, the cab drivers who smell of leather,
Shoe salesman round every corner,
Folks asking for coins,
Mail ladies with Carpal Tunnel
Soda-guzzling fat kids
Coked-out sweaty toll booth people
The nameless the homeless the shoeless the hairless
There are the football players, the deacons, the late-night whores;

There are the gray judges, trampoline families, laughter running through sprinklers;
There are Lobster-catchers whose hands smell like salt and death;
There are Siamese twins, plow drivers, folks with no faith;
There are musty shut-ins,
Gamers, the high-fashion minded,
All of them silently ticking, ticking, ticking,
The world a massive mutable bomb.

And then there is you, Ruby, with your
Six-to-eight weeks to live
And your twirling dance ’round the dining room;
Oh how I wish I could know you more
(ask you more questions, tell you more things)
And that time could stop for now.
But it won’t
(it doesn’t; it never has)
And when your spark arcs over my roof some night
On it’s way to where you’re going
I hope we can share a brief glance
So you can see me smiling so wide
Thinking
You lived!  You lived!

Eh. Some random list of crap.

1. I sure am tired.

2.  Last week, after having listened to the crappy muzak at work all day, Ron said, “Why are all these crappy 60s songs all about his GTO, his 16-year-old girlfriend, or a dance move?”

3.  Seriously, no more hip indie bands can have the word “deer” in the title.  I simply won’t allow it.

4.  This guy who played the pedophile in “Happiness” is in everything!

5.  Kate’s band, Soulgrass Freedom Junction, does a surprisingly rockin’ version of “Mrs. Robinson”.  Dare I say better than the original?  Yes.  Just disappointed they didn’t play “White Rabbit”.

6.  When will spell check recognize MySpace and Facebook as words?

7.  I now officially like vaccuuming.

8.  Having trouble writing anything of value lately.  Am concerned.

9.  Seven Mary Three in Reading, PA in August.  Who’s in?

10.  Lesson from today: when someone asks me where I think “we” should eat, ask how many people “we” are before offering suggestions.